FACTA UNIVERSITATIS Series: Linguistics and Literature Vol. 6, No 1, 2008, pp. 73 - 84 THE THEME OF ORESTEIA IN EUGENE O'NEILL' S MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA UDC 821.111-21.09 Petra Mitić Faculty of Philosophy, Niš Abstract. The paper is concerned with the mythical theme of Oresteia as it has been reworked in Eugene O'Neill's play Mourning Becomes Electra. After juxtaposing the key elements in the story as they appear in Aeschylus and Sophocles on the one hand, and Eugene O' Neill on the other, the analysis moves on to consider the significance of the changes introduced in O'Neill's version of this ancient story. The focal point of the analysis is the brief comparison of two disparate models of reading – the Freudian and the Jungian model – and the relevance of their different implications for the patriarchal culture of reason. Key words: Oresteia, Eschylus, Eugene O'Neill, the myth of Oedipus, Fromm, Freud, Jung While dreaming, man is a great poet; when he wakes up he is a wretched man again. At least in most of the cases.1 I In his dreams man comes back to his inner self. Both dreams and myths are messages that we send to ourselves from the depths of the unconscious. They are the storehouse of our deepest insights connecting modern man with his primeval roots. In them we have the perennial experience of the human race recorded. And yet, in his waking hours, while preoccupied with the self-centered drives of the ego, modern man seems to have forgot- ten the language of his true self.2 According to Giambattista Vico, the l8th century Neapolitan philosopher, man is in- stinctively poetic in his response to the world. Received May 5, 2008 1 Borhes/Sabato, Razgovori, Decje Novine, l988, p. 175 2 This is a briefly summarized argument of Fromm's book The Forgotten Language. 74 P. MITIĆ The one genuinely distinctive and permanent human characteristic is dis- cernible in the faculty of 'poetic wisdom', which manifests itself as the ca- pacity and the necessity to generate myths, and to use language metaphori- cally: to deal with the world, that is, not directly but at one remove, by means of other agencies: not literally, but 'poetically'.3 That is why, for Vico, the first science to be learned should be mythology, or the in- terpretation of fables. By learning how to interpret myths properly we can draw nearer to understanding our own selves. Yet, in the past, and even today, myths were given unfair or misleading treatment. By the proponents of science as the only true instrument of knowledge and the only right approach to reality myths were looked upon as merely na- ive representations of the world - quaint relics of the nursery age of mankind4; or they were taken to be figments of the poet' s imagination, which had nothing to tell us about reality. From the point of view of the orthodox believer, myths were taken to be true sto- ries recounting events that had really happened. In all instances – whether we take a mythical story to be a relic of the past, or a kind of ornamental embroidery of reality, which we can enjoy at leisure, or, finally, a recorded account of the events as they really happened - we are bound to miss its most significant dimension. From the end of the nineteenth, and the beginning of the twentieth century, however, a different approach has gradually taken shape. The most distinguished among those who initiated a different viewpoint are J.J. Bachofen and Sigmund Freud. The former pointed at the significance of myths in terms of their religious, psychological, and historical meaning, while the latter explained their importance in terms of their peculiar language, which is the language of symbol. The language of myth was thus taken to be significantly related to the understanding of our own psyche. And yet, one has to bear in mind that, in spite of the liberating aspects of his thought, the key word, actually, for the system Freud developed is - control. The rationalistic element in Freud, as Lionel Trilling was right to emphasize,5 is foremost in his system - by no means secondary or accidental. Freud him- self described the therapeutic aim of his psychoanalytic method as 'the draining of the Zuyder Zee" - his aim, in other words, was the control of the irrational, non-logical, 'night side' of man' s life. The measures he, therefore, proposed were all aimed at the strength- ening of the ego at the expense of the id. Ironically, it was by adopting this approach that he actually remained true to the ideals, and the ideology, of the pro-patriarchal cultural background of the age that he was so insistent on opposing. Indeed, in spite of his re- peated criticism of it, Freud actually remained a devoted spokesman of the age of Enlightenment. He spoke from within the limitations of the patriarchal culture of the Western world, and his view on myths, based on his interpretation of dreams (which he took to be in the service of the pleasure principle as opposed to the reality principle) nec- essarily reflected the patterns prevailing in the culture he spoke from. His mode of thinking can be, therefore, traced back to the early Greek philosophers who initiated a 3 Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics, Routledge, 1989, p. 15 4 How much this viewpoint has been pervasive in modern thought is made clear in Ellmann, who makes refer- ence to James Frazer. According to Ellman, the most influential name associated with the study of myth early in the 20th century is precisely that of Sir James G. Frazer, and his influential study The Golden Bough. And yet, Ellman warns, Frazer is essentally a rationalist. "Though he recognizes and fully illustrates the workings of myth in human culture, myth for him is a primitive habit of mind that we have largely outgrown; it is an addic- tion to magic." Ellmann, The Modern Tradition, p. 617 5 Lionel Trilling, "Freud and Literature", 20th Century Literary Criticism, ed. by D. Lodge, Longman, 1975, p. 280 The Theme of Oresteia in Eugene O'Neill' S Mourning Becomes Electra 75 new religion in honour of their patron Apollo - the religion of logos and rational thought - and in doing so laid the foundation for the still dominant culture of today. The new ra- tional thought proved to be particularly hostile towards the heritage of early mythology. With their latent and ambiguous meanings, the language of myths was found to be pro- foundly disturbing, and was disqualified, accordingly. One of the most uncompromising rejections of early Greek mythology was made by Socrates. Myths frightened or offended him; he preferred to turn his back on them and discipline his mind to think scientifically ..... Socra- tes, in turning his back on poetic myths, was really turning his back on the Moon- goddess who inspired them and who demanded that man should pay woman spiritual and sexual homage: what is called Platonic love, the phi- losopher' s escape from the power of the Goddess into intellectual homo- sexuality, was really Socratic love.6 Unlike Socrates who, in the interpretation of Graves, decided to 'turn his back' on myths, Freud chose to interpret their validity by shedding the light of science upon them. His scientific method, however, proved to have followed the very same impulse which once had moved Socrates - the impulse of the male intellect trying to hide its own wish to control meaning, or make itself spiritually self-sufficient. And yet, since like all true po- etry, myths speak through symbols and not directly, they can not be self-explanatory, but remain radically open to interpretation..The method we use to approach myths, or art in general, will necessarily reflect some of our own standpoints - some basic choices we have made in our own lives. An understanding of the language of myth, in other words, cannot be unrelated to our readiness (or our lack of it) to oppose the one-sided patterns prevailing in the male-oriented culture. A great work of art is like a dream; for all its apparent obviousness it does not explain itself and is never unequivocal. A dream never says: " You ought", or "This is the truth". It presents an image in much the same way as nature allows a plant to grow, and we must draw our own conclusions.7 II The mythical story of the murder of the Greek Commander-in-chief, king Agamem- non, by his wife, and the consequent murder of the mother by the son avenging the father, was treated by all three ancient Greek tragedians. The version written by Aeschylus, however, surpasses the rest by its depth and significance. It is also the one complete tril- ogy to have been preserved from the Greek theatre. In his version the focus is on the con- flict between the right of the mother, and everything she stands for, and the right of the father. The conflict is resolved in the city of Athens, where at length Orestes takes refuge with the goddess Athene, who affords him protection and appoints the court of Aeropagus to decide his fate. In Greek mythology the goddess of wisdom, Athene, was the offspring of Zeus and was believed to have sprung forth from her father's head, 'puri- fied ' from the mother' s part in creation. Ironically, it will turn out that Athene herself, a 6 Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, Faber and Faber, 1961, p. 10 7 C.G.